Tv Dinner Still A Strictly American Phenomenon

September 12, 1985|By Nathan Cobb, Boston Globe.

Probably the most remarkable thing about the TV dinner--some might say the only remarkable thing about the TV dinner--is that it never really captured palates in other countries. Like big cars, the one-stop frozen meal is an American idea that simply hasn`t traveled well. French families do not shout their bon appetits over microwaved chicken cordon bleu with baby carrots and rice pilaf from Le Menu, despite the fact that the company`s advertising proclaims such meals to be ``So extraordinary you`d dare serve them with a vintage wine.``

``It`s completely baffling to us,`` says Sam Martin when asked why frozen dinners haven`t washed up on foreign shores in appreciable numbers. Martin is the editor of Quick Frozen Foods International, a trade magazine that claims circulation in 96 countries. ``It may have something to do with that they have different kinds of stoves in other countries,`` Martin ventures, still sounding puzzled that the rest of the world has somehow passed up this red, white and blue contribution to gastronomy.

``For God`s sake, don`t call them TV dinners,`` pleads DeWayne Whitehead, managing partner of Technomic Inc., a firm that advises several food processing companies. Nor do frozen food executives tend to be amused by the old joke about the TV dinner, the one that says you`re better off eating the box and throwing away the contents. The trade much prefers to talk in terms of ``premium frozen meals,`` meaning those relatively upscale dinners of the 1980s, wherein chicken breast florentine laid out on a plastic platter now shares shelf space with plain old fried chicken served on an aluminum tray.

Ah, but traditional-style TV dinners hang on. You can find them tucked away in supermarket frozen food chests, where they increasingly play second banana to the likes of $3.59 concoctions featuring seafood newburg or beef burgundy. They offer salisbury steak for $1.19 and an entire fishcake dinner, with peas and potato puffs, for 85 cents. Never mind that R. Gordon McGovern, president of the Campbell Soup Co., which makes Swanson frozen dinners, once publicly referred to this kind of thing as ``junk food.`` A nation`s gotta eat, right?

``It`s a whole different market than the `premium` dinners. It`s blue collar, kids and senior citizens. And that market will always be there.``

Certainly there was a market in 1953, when C.A. Swanson & Sons, then an independent poultry-freezing outfit in Omaha, unleashed a trademarked TV Dinner of sliced turkey and gravy served on cornbread and accompanied by buttered peas and sweet potatoes. Frozen dinners had been offered in a few retail stores and on airplanes since 1945--the airline versions were called

``Strato-Plates``--but this was the first time that large numbers of Earthbound Americans had gotten a taste of such fare. This successful debut into the mass marketplace was enough to spice up an otherwise dull year in which Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated president for the first time, the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee and the most popular song was ``Doggie in the Window.``

The package containing those early TV Dinners was perfect: a fake woodgrain TV set complete with knobs, its ``screen`` filled with an image of the aluminum-clad meal itself. Who could possibly care that the food looked dreadful? Just heat and serve! U.S. Inspected! Yours for 89 cents.

The name was flawless, too. Baby-booming America was in the early stages of its television addiction. Who wanted to cook during the ``Camel News Caravan`` with John Cameron Swayze or ``Texaco Star Theater`` with Milton Berle? The Academy Awards ceremony was being televised for the first time in 1953. Howard Cosell and Dan Rather? The former was a rookie sportscaster at ABC Radio; the latter was receiving his degree in journalism from Sam Houston State College in Huntsville, Tex.

Swanson Frozen Foods held the U.S. trademark for TV Dinner for several years, although the term eventually became generic. Swanson still uses it on packages in Canada.

Frozen foods had been around since 1930, when 10 western Massachusetts retailers had participated in selling Clarence Birdseye`s novel 26-item line. Fruits were initially the best-selling product, with vegetables becoming the favorite shortly after World War II. But Swanson`s TV Dinner gave birth to the ``prepared frozen food industry,`` not to mention the notion of sitting down with Kukla, Fran and Ollie to a meal of precooked beef, gravy, potatoes, carrots and peas. It seemed that the side dishes were always--always--carrots and peas. A new piece of folding household furniture was even contrived for the times: the TV Tray.